Still crazy after all these years

REVOLUTIONARY or reckless? One of these terms will eventually be used to describe the claim made by Humphrey Maris, a British physicist based in the US. He contends that the electron, a fundamental particle, can be split in half (see p 24).

His idea is even stranger than you might think because it's not just the electron's integrity that's at stake. Maris has calculated that the electron's "wave function" can be split. For eight decades, physicists have considered the wave function as no more than a convenient mathematical tool for calculating the behaviour of electrons and other players on the atomic stage.

But if it can be split, and stays split, the wave function must have physical reality, says Maris. If he's right, you and I aren't just described by wave functions, we're made of them.

Whether or not this claim is confirmed by experimentand we should get the ...

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